Melly Still (Director): It's one of these celebrated coming of age stories with a twist. What Lovely Bones is about is a 14 year old girl, Susie, she is murdered by a neighbour in 1973 Pennsylvania. Thereafter, once she's in her afterlife or in her heaven, she can't stop watching life on Earth and she finds it unbearable because her family are suffering so much. Susie is trying to get people on Earth to work out who her murderer is and there's a lot of tension leading up to that. 

Charlotte Beaumont (Susie): Her heaven is high school, it doesn't go beyond that. She's got all this hope and this desire to discover and it presents people in a very non-judgemental way and Alice does that in the book and Bryony has captured that in the play. You know, Susie is watching them from heaven but it's all very human and relatable.

Melly: So Anna, who's designed the piece, has come up with this extraordinary installation.

Ana Inés Jabares-Pita (Designer): We've created almost like a massive intallation rather than a set design and that's going to help us to create all sorts of magic images of appearing and disappearing and putting things upside down and creating floating images.

Melly: It allows us to see things from different perspectives which is sort of what Susie the protaganist is always doing. I think the thing that interests me the most about Lovely Bones is make believe. Narrative and make belief and storytelling becomes an important part of the healing process in times of real trauma and grief.

Charlotte: It's such a beautiful story and I really like that it's not about the murder. It's about the aftermath of that and the grief process of that and how that affects families.

The Lovely Bones is at the Everyman, Tue 25 Sep to Sat 6 Oct